The Cabedge Patch

Where we cultivate industry leading thoughts

Responding to Requests for a Proposal (RFP) is a normal part of the job when you’re on a sales team. Here at Atiba and Cabedge, we receive a lot of them each month. Sometimes we are one of hundreds of companies spending time explaining the process, doing the research to match up your offerings with the needs of the client and finding examples of past work to showcase. So when the Tennessee Secretary of State sent out their RFP last year about building a mobile application to help with the voting process, we were super excited to learn we were one of three companies who got to come in to pitch our idea. We were even more thrilled when our team was chosen to complete the project.

The ultimate goal of this project was to work with the folks in the Tennessee Secretary of State’s office to create a smart phone application to provide accurate and timely election information to Tennessee citizens in an intuitive manner. Users were to be able to use the application to conveniently obtain individualized information to help them in the process of voting, including:

Early voting and Election Day polling locations and hours of operation

Candidate list for upcoming elections

Ability to mark sample ballots for upcoming election

Navigation to early voting and Election Day polling locations

County election commission information

Access online election results through the application

“This is another Tennessee voter resource that answers common questions about voting from one’s phone,” Secretary of State Tre Hargett said, “The free app allows you to view voter-specific information when searching by name or address. While our team had experience with web design and API development, we had never launched a mobile application. Atiba helped us take that next step in providing election information to Tennessee voters conveniently through their mobile devices.”

Our process for projects is simple, yet powerful: discover, define, design, develop and test. What we’ve learned after being in business for over 22 years is that the key to a successful project is a detailed discovery session with all key players involved that leads to an approved project plan. Amy Rochelle, leader of our mobile application team as well as our project management conducted a detailed discovery which then defined the project clearly and established the timeline for an aggressive phase 1 launch, specifically to allow ample time for testing before early voting.

During the design phase, our designer created a patriotic template with an icon set that was simple for users to understand. Development then began, using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript/JQuery utilizing PhoneGap/Cordova. The Atiba team had weekly, sometimes daily check-ins with the development team from the state to ensure updates were tested on all platforms and any bugs were investigated and fixed in a timely manner.

Overall, this project was a smashing success, staying on time and on budget while creating a fully functional finished product for our end users. Andrew Dodd, elections attorney and project liaison said “both the mobile app and the web app got very good traffic. We’re at 13,576 downloads—8,784 iOS and 4,792 Android and we got as high as the #11 free Reference app in the App Store for a few hours on Election Day. We’re very pleased.”

Atiba University dug into the strategy and analytics behind social media with guest presenters Jon Henshaw and Arienne Holland from Raven. Moderated by our own Paul Hickey, VP of Interactive Marketing for Atiba, we learned about the importance of establishing your business priorities while facing the truth of your business realities. Social media is a very important aspect of marketing your company, but the most successful results come with a strategy and tools to measure your efforts.

Jon Henshaw, co-founder of Raven, pointed out important points to consider before starting in on a social campaign such as the demographic of each network, the time and cost involved as well as your audiences expectations. Arienne followed up with discussing the importance of mapping out your journey, including defining who is in charge of the strategy and what they would do in the case of a crisis.

As per the usual, the folks at Raven are great about providing recommendations for tools to use to accomplish your goals and in this case, how to report on the results. Along with Google Analytics, which is free and used widely by our strategists at Atiba, here is a list of others you may want to review.

If you missed the event, we’ve uploaded video to our YouTube channel and you can see what others were saying by following #atibau on Twitter. We will announce future Atiba University events on our website too!

The whole idea behind Atiba University was bringing people together who are doing cool things in the technology industry to collaborate and offer a platform for sharing in the shape of a networking event. In the 18 months that we’ve been offering AU, we’ve discussed the Geek and Human side of lots of topics including mobile device management, cloud security, brand experience, search engine optimization and project management but we’ve not gotten hands on. Until this week. Read More

We got an email from a professor of graphic design at Murray State who told us a group of graduating seniors were taking a road trip to Nashville and they wanted to meet us. Us! Cabedge! Well, they really wanted to meet the creative team so we made it happen and spent an hour with them at E|Spaces last week.

We talked about what they could do to stand out as applicants, what to expect from the hiring process, what makes a great client, what makes a good-not-great client, and how to avoid bad clients – if, theoretically, such a thing were to exist. Read More

About Us

As a web-centric communications company, we offer marketing strategy, web design, SEO, social media management, copywriting/content development and programming integration services from our offices in Nashville and Franklin, TN. Our ultimate goal is to help our clients achieve their business goals.